1. Field of the invention
This invention relates to monitors for digital systems and, more particularly, is concerned with apparatus and a method for providing real-time data acquisition and real-time display of digital information words having addresses within a predefined range.
2. Prior Art
Various techniques are available for monitoring the performance of a digital hardware or software. Debugger software programs are used to debug software programs. Emulators model a system and its performance. Execution profilers are software programs which provide statistical information about activity and do not deal with actual information values. Logic analyzers are instruments which monitor the data associated with an address, but do not dynamically monitor changes in real time. Intrusive analysis code can be entered into a program for analyzing performance, but this affects the system performance.
These other technique suffer various problems and shortcomings. In general, they provide a relatively low rate of information transmission to the user; they do not have the ability to present a correlation of different data sources or kinds of data; and they have inflexible calculation and display functions. In some cases, the implementations of these techniques interfere with system functions and performance, lack the capability for real-time display, and are unable to manipulate target data values.
A need exists for a monitoring system which can capture data information having addresses within a preselected address range and which provides for display of that data information in real-time. A need also exists for a monitoring system which provides for flexible calculation and display of acquired data without interfering with the target system functions or performance.